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Yahoo
a day ago
- Health
- Yahoo
The Artist Who Captured the Contradictions of Femininity
Observing a woman get ready to go out is, for many girls, an early glimpse at the ritualistic preparations that femininity can entail. For the artist Christina Ramberg, watching her mother getting dressed for parties—in particular, putting on a corset called a merry widow, which gave her an hourglass figure—revealed the extent to which the female form was a ruse. 'I can remember being stunned by how it transformed her body, how it pushed up her breasts and slendered down her waist,' Ramberg later observed. 'I used to think that this is what men want women to look like; she's transforming herself into the kind of body men want. I thought it was fascinating,' she said. 'In some ways, I thought it was awful.' These dueling reactions, fascination and repulsion, come up in Ramberg's paintings, which, especially early in her career, fixated on the artifice of the female body—all the different ways that women construct themselves, with the aid of the mass market. Her striking portraits of women's body parts feature torsos strapped into corsets, feet shoved into high heels, intricately arranged updos. The images are crisp, flat, and slyly cropped or angled to never show faces. And although they're sensual, they're also depersonalized and often off-kilter; sometimes, hair is parted in unnatural directions, or skin is patchy. The dueling presence of unruly and taming forces in these paintings recalls the consumer products that divide women's bodies into conquerable parts: the sprays that restrain, the undergarments that shape. As the artist Riva Lehrer puts it in one of several essays accompanying a traveling exhibit of Ramberg's work, currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 'Without the face, the body must tell all.' What it tells, in these paintings, is by turns sobering and playful—and never sanctimonious. Ramberg's explorations began to take shape in the late '60s, when she was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago painting on small, cheap Masonite panels. She became affiliated with the Chicago Imagists, a loose grouping of figurative artists whose work tended toward the colorful, grotesque, and surreal (though, at times since its initial use, the label has seemed to result in a downplaying of the stylistic differences among its members). One of Ramberg's teachers at SAIC and a mentor to the Imagists, Raymond Yoshida, was a deep pedagogical influence. He was an avid visitor of flea markets and instilled in students like Ramberg a love—and practice—of collecting items. Collecting, Yoshida said, was a way of establishing a pattern of 'looking,' and Ramberg over time amassed hundreds of dolls that she displayed in her apartment. Her paintings of fragmented bodies are their own kind of collection—and their own pattern of 'looking.' Ramberg wasn't unique in probing the commodification of female sexuality, though a particular blend of compositional rigor, sly humor, and curiosity gave an engrossing velocity to her paintings across the 1970s and '80s. The period in which she developed as an artist was charged with contradictions, one that saw second-wave feminism cresting amid a cultural tug-of-war over sexual liberation. Gloria Steinem had by that point published her exposé about working undercover as a bunny at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Club; Playboy magazine, then headquartered in Chicago, hit the peak of its circulation in the early '70s. (Perhaps ironically, Ramberg's work occasionally appeared in the publication.) Cindy Sherman would, in the early '80s, make her famed photographic series in which she posed as centerfold models, drawing attention to the mechanics of male attention. Similar cultural shorthands are at play in Ramberg's paintings. Her early work pulls from the brisk visuals of advertisements, the seriality of comic panels, the close crops of voyeuristic photography: These familiar elements initially draw viewers in, and might even seem to point toward a more standard indictment of the male gaze, or of consumerism, but Ramberg threw changeups that turned her paintings darker and more intriguingly complex. One series, for instance, shows thick tranches of hair cinched into the shape of corsets, or possibly vases; the plaited tresses are sharp tricks on the viewer's eye, a menacing yet sensual play on the controlling perfection that shapewear (or, perhaps, home decor) helps to enforce. The interplay between skin and fabric in some of her images also seems mischievous. Ramberg had an enduring interest in fashion—at 6 foot 1, she often made her own clothes—and rendered fabrics carefully. She might give a bustier a fine, pebbly texture, redirecting the viewer's attention away from bare skin, while also perhaps nodding to how idiosyncratic personal taste can be when it comes to the materials we wear. In one image from 1971, a white fabric wound around a hand turns into a partial glove, snugly encasing just three fingers, leaving the other two free; with delicate humor, it hints at the thin line between what we wear and what we are. In her journals, Ramberg once described an idea she had for a painting, in which the ruffles of an item of worn clothing would actually be painted as flesh. The implication of clothing as a type of skin is creepy but clarifies Ramberg's intent: She seemed to be exploring the artificiality baked into how we show ourselves to others. In Ramberg's wildest imaginations, clothing is no longer simply a mechanism that pushes up breasts or slims down a waistline; it becomes an authentic, even crucial, layer of self-presentation—as important to our sense of self as flesh itself. The surreality of this idea expands the perimeter of our emotional response. With that hypothetical conflating of skin as fabric, or fabric as skin—the blurring of our core selves and the 'layers' we put on for the world—Ramberg seemed to question whether most everything about ourselves might be constructed, and whether we are, in fact, what we construct. In all this, she was quite interested in hidden or subconscious desires. Her diaries, which she kept from 1969 to 1980, include sexual fantasies, and she describes dreams of bondage and illicit trysts. To Ramberg, like the complicated memory of her mother lacing herself into a corset, fantasies are ultimately generative—both productive and unpredictable. Even in grief, Ramberg seemed to find solace in the affordances of fantasy. In 1973, when she was 27, Ramberg lost a baby that she delivered prematurely. Some of her female forms in this period shifted away from overt playfulness, while maintaining an openness to multiple readings—one 1974 painting titled Gloved shows an austere torso, this time wrapped in gauze that could be interpreted as either medical dressing or bondage wear. The ambiguity Ramberg painted into the fabric asks us to leave room for either possibility. As Ramberg's work changed over the years, the focus of her gaze shifted, too. Some of her later paintings turn women's bodies into mechanistic objects—almost gridlike, compartmentalized structures. In one, a smaller body drops out of the bigger one, as from a factory assembly line. This seeming anxiety about women's bodies as sites of productivity reminded me of Ramberg's diary entries recounting her life. She described her days as a mother (in 1975, she had a child with her husband, the artist Phil Hanson), the aforementioned dreams and fantasies, the work she did in the studio. She documented everything in one place, sometimes using different-colored ink to differentiate between aspects of her day; but she didn't cordon one part of her life off from another. The entangled accounts suggest that she saw everything she did—the chaotic overwhelm of it all—as her work. The diaries also show a preoccupation with the constraints, and influence, of the domestic realm, the way that the details of the world around you can affect what you make, what you think about, what you see. To me, this is another example of Ramberg's mode of 'looking.' Her interest in fabric—as functional material, spiritual armor, generative art—seems distinctly connected to her interest in working with constraint, rather than trying to bust completely free. This philosophical inclination is apparent even in her later works, when she turned away from the female body: A sequence of quilted works celebrated the structure of geometric patterns, while a series known as her 'satellite' paintings—a stark set of towers that nonetheless look vaguely torso-like—might be read as a stripped-down meditation on form and order. Ramberg died in 1995 of Pick's disease, which had led to early-onset dementia; she was only 49. By all accounts, she was someone who saw art as a practice, a form of cultural critique, a crucial community; her role as a longtime teacher at SAIC, she later said, kept her connected to 'just beginning and deeply committed artists' and helped her balance 'immersion in my own work.' Perhaps that sense of proportionality explains why her paintings, and the ideas she probed again and again through them, have maintained their acuity. With focused precision but no piety, she explored what happens when 'the individuality of the person is lost to the demands of femininity,' as Lehrer puts it, all the while maintaining curiosity about the powerful psychologies that helped build those expectations. And in examining the entanglements between women and the world they are a part of, Ramberg seemed to understand, ultimately, that a little bit of strangeness can bring precarity to the viewer's experience, and then expand it. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Artist Who Captured the Contradictions of Femininity
Observing a woman get ready to go out is, for many girls, an early glimpse at the ritualistic preparations that femininity can entail. For the artist Christina Ramberg, watching her mother getting dressed for parties—in particular, putting on a corset called a merry widow, which gave her an hourglass figure—revealed the extent to which the female form was a ruse. 'I can remember being stunned by how it transformed her body, how it pushed up her breasts and slendered down her waist,' Ramberg later observed. 'I used to think that this is what men want women to look like; she's transforming herself into the kind of body men want. I thought it was fascinating,' she said. 'In some ways, I thought it was awful.' These dueling reactions, fascination and repulsion, come up in Ramberg's paintings, which, especially early in her career, fixated on the artifice of the female body—all the different ways that women construct themselves, with the aid of the mass market. Her striking portraits of women's body parts feature torsos strapped into corsets, feet shoved into high heels, intricately arranged updos. The images are crisp, flat, and slyly cropped or angled to never show faces. And although they're sensual, they're also depersonalized and often off-kilter; sometimes, hair is parted in unnatural directions, or skin is patchy. The dueling presence of unruly and taming forces in these paintings recalls the consumer products that divide women's bodies into conquerable parts: the sprays that restrain, the undergarments that shape. As the artist Riva Lehrer puts it in one of several essays accompanying a traveling exhibit of Ramberg's work, currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 'Without the face, the body must tell all.' What it tells, in these paintings, is by turns sobering and playful—and never sanctimonious. Ramberg's explorations began to take shape in the late '60s, when she was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago painting on small, cheap Masonite panels. She became affiliated with the Chicago Imagists, a loose grouping of figurative artists whose work tended toward the colorful, grotesque, and surreal (though, at times since its initial use, the label has seemed to result in a downplaying of the stylistic differences among its members). One of Ramberg's teachers at SAIC and a mentor to the Imagists, Raymond Yoshida, was a deep pedagogical influence. He was an avid visitor of flea markets and instilled in students like Ramberg a love—and practice—of collecting items. Collecting, Yoshida said, was a way of establishing a pattern of 'looking,' and Ramberg over time amassed hundreds of dolls that she displayed in her apartment. Her paintings of fragmented bodies are their own kind of collection—and their own pattern of 'looking.' Ramberg wasn't unique in probing the commodification of female sexuality, though a particular blend of compositional rigor, sly humor, and curiosity gave an engrossing velocity to her paintings across the 1970s and '80s. The period in which she developed as an artist was charged with contradictions, one that saw second-wave feminism cresting amid a cultural tug-of-war over sexual liberation. Gloria Steinem had by that point published her exposé about working undercover as a bunny at Hugh Hefner's Playboy Club; Playboy magazine, then headquartered in Chicago, hit the peak of its circulation in the early '70s. (Perhaps ironically, Ramberg's work occasionally appeared in the publication.) Cindy Sherman would, in the early '80s, make her famed photographic series in which she posed as centerfold models, drawing attention to the mechanics of male attention. Similar cultural shorthands are at play in Ramberg's paintings. Her early work pulls from the brisk visuals of advertisements, the seriality of comic panels, the close crops of voyeuristic photography: These familiar elements initially draw viewers in, and might even seem to point toward a more standard indictment of the male gaze, or of consumerism, but Ramberg threw changeups that turned her paintings darker and more intriguingly complex. One series, for instance, shows thick tranches of hair cinched into the shape of corsets, or possibly vases; the plaited tresses are sharp tricks on the viewer's eye, a menacing yet sensual play on the controlling perfection that shapewear (or, perhaps, home decor) helps to enforce. The interplay between skin and fabric in some of her images also seems mischievous. Ramberg had an enduring interest in fashion—at 6 foot 1, she often made her own clothes—and rendered fabrics carefully. She might give a bustier a fine, pebbly texture, redirecting the viewer's attention away from bare skin, while also perhaps nodding to how idiosyncratic personal taste can be when it comes to the materials we wear. In one image from 1971, a white fabric wound around a hand turns into a partial glove, snugly encasing just three fingers, leaving the other two free; with delicate humor, it hints at the thin line between what we wear and what we are. In her journals, Ramberg once described an idea she had for a painting, in which the ruffles of an item of worn clothing would actually be painted as flesh. The implication of clothing as a type of skin is creepy but clarifies Ramberg's intent: She seemed to be exploring the artificiality baked into how we show ourselves to others. In Ramberg's wildest imaginations, clothing is no longer simply a mechanism that pushes up breasts or slims down a waistline; it becomes an authentic, even crucial, layer of self-presentation—as important to our sense of self as flesh itself. The surreality of this idea expands the perimeter of our emotional response. With that hypothetical conflating of skin as fabric, or fabric as skin—the blurring of our core selves and the 'layers' we put on for the world—Ramberg seemed to question whether most everything about ourselves might be constructed, and whether we are, in fact, what we construct. In all this, she was quite interested in hidden or subconscious desires. Her diaries, which she kept from 1969 to 1980, include sexual fantasies, and she describes dreams of bondage and illicit trysts. To Ramberg, like the complicated memory of her mother lacing herself into a corset, fantasies are ultimately generative—both productive and unpredictable. Even in grief, Ramberg seemed to find solace in the affordances of fantasy. In 1973, when she was 27, Ramberg lost a baby that she delivered prematurely. Some of her female forms in this period shifted away from overt playfulness, while maintaining an openness to multiple readings— one 1974 painting titled Gloved shows an austere torso, this time wrapped in gauze that could be interpreted as either medical dressing or bondage wear. The ambiguity Ramberg painted into the fabric asks us to leave room for either possibility. As Ramberg's work changed over the years, the focus of her gaze shifted, too. Some of her later paintings turn women's bodies into mechanistic objects—almost gridlike, compartmentalized structures. In one, a smaller body drops out of the bigger one, as from a factory assembly line. This seeming anxiety about women's bodies as sites of productivity reminded me of Ramberg's diary entries recounting her life. She described her days as a mother (in 1975, she had a child with her husband, the artist Phil Hanson), the aforementioned dreams and fantasies, the work she did in the studio. She documented everything in one place, sometimes using different-colored ink to differentiate between aspects of her day; but she didn't cordon one part of her life off from another. The entangled accounts suggest that she saw everything she did—the chaotic overwhelm of it all—as her work. The diaries also show a preoccupation with the constraints, and influence, of the domestic realm, the way that the details of the world around you can affect what you make, what you think about, what you see. To me, this is another example of Ramberg's mode of 'looking.' Her interest in fabric—as functional material, spiritual armor, generative art—seems distinctly connected to her interest in working with constraint, rather than trying to bust completely free. This philosophical inclination is apparent even in her later works, when she turned away from the female body: A sequence of quilted works celebrated the structure of geometric patterns, while a series known as her 'satellite' paintings—a stark set of towers that nonetheless look vaguely torso-like—might be read as a stripped-down meditation on form and order. Ramberg died in 1995 of Pick's disease, which had led to early-onset dementia; she was only 49. By all accounts, she was someone who saw art as a practice, a form of cultural critique, a crucial community; her role as a longtime teacher at SAIC, she later said, kept her connected to 'just beginning and deeply committed artists' and helped her balance 'immersion in my own work.' Perhaps that sense of proportionality explains why her paintings, and the ideas she probed again and again through them, have maintained their acuity. With focused precision but no piety, she explored what happens when 'the individuality of the person is lost to the demands of femininity,' as Lehrer puts it, all the while maintaining curiosity about the powerful psychologies that helped build those expectations. And in examining the entanglements between women and the world they are a part of, Ramberg seemed to understand, ultimately, that a little bit of strangeness can bring precarity to the viewer's experience, and then expand it.
DW
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- DW
Two Indian women artists blazing their own trails – DW – 05/22/2025
Mayuri Chari and Janhavi Khemka's artwork is very different. But they both have powerful artistic visions informed by personal experiences of gender, disability and family — and they're both making names for themselves. 'Art is my accessibility': Janhavi Khemka Janhavi Khemka's mother has always been the source of her inspiration as an artist. Her earliest memories of making art involve her mother: "My mother would help me with my school assignments, explaining them through hand gestures, facial expressions, and body language." Khemka (above right), who was born in Varanasi, India in 1993, is hearing-impaired. Her mother taught her to read lips in Hindi at a young age and encouraged her artistic exploration. But she died when Khemka was 15. "The impact she left on me helped me navigate an able-bodied world, further inspiring my art through light, touch, experimental sound, and tactile mediums," Khemka said in a written interview with DW. Janhavi Khemka's woodcut work 'Self-portrait' (2024) is inspired by Van Gogh Image: Janhavi Khemka It is in this able-bodied world that Khemka is making a name for herself as an interdisciplinary artist working across a diverse array of mediums, from woodcut to painting to performance and animation. She earned an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) from the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago and, prior to that, one from Visva-Bharati University at Santiniketan, a historic education center based in West Bengal that is deeply rooted in Indian culture and traditions. "Santiniketan opened a new world for me, as it was my first time being away from home. It helped me grow, understand how my disability shapes my identity. It was transformative, helping me expand my perspectives, connect with people and artists, and deepen my engagement with art." Friends and mentors have supported Khemka's career as an artist, but she still faces a lack of accessibility and is "constantly self-aware" and having to explain her experience to others, which can be "exhausting." Khemka's art has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Much of it relates to her being a hearing-impaired person who experiences sound through vibration. Some of her works, like "Impress/ion" and "Your name, please?" are interactive, involving a direct exchange with individual audience members. In 2021, she created "Letter to My Mother" — a vibrating platform adorned in a projected animated light pattern consisting of lips made from woodcut prints. It recalls how her mother taught her to lip read on a mat. For her, "It's a personal experience that connects me with my mom in a way that words alone cannot express." For viewers, it allows them to experience sound in a tactile fashion and ushers them into an intimate moment in the artist's life. "My greatest success is feeling comfortable in the world, where I can exist freely and confidently," Khemka says. 'A woman is not born, she is created': Mayuri Chari A free and confident existence: This is always what conceptual artist Mayuri Chari hopes for herself as a woman — and for women everywhere. She prefers the term priorities to success. And her priorities are speaking through her work, which focuses on the female body, and expressing what she wants to tell people, not what people want her to tell. In fact, they don't always like what her art tells. Conceptual artist Mayuri Chari's work draws on the motto, 'A woman is not born, she is created' Image: Tausif Matwal Whether through print, textile, film or even cow dung, Chari examines and challenges how women are seen, positioned and treated across various strata of Indian society. "They are not stories or tales," she says of her artwork's messages about women. "They are reality." She started experimenting with the female body as a subject during her MFA at the University of Hyderabad. For one semester show, she made large prints of her own body. She saw the work artistically, for its texture and colors. "But they," she said of her classmates and other viewers, "their gaze was totally different. They saw it as a vulgar thing and suggested that I shouldn't do this openly." Their response only got her thinking more. "I started to question why: Why are people seeing the body as something vulgar, sexy? Why not as a creative thing?" she told DW in a phone interview from her home in rural Maharashtra. The body prints Chari made during her master's, including the one above, significantly influenced her artistic direction Image: Mayuri Chair In Chari's work, the female body is neither a goddess nor an object of consumption but rather a statement of self-awareness. Yet her art has been controversial in India for simply featuring nude female bodies — realistic, imperfect, bold. Indian galleries have rejected her works and exhibition venue owners have asked her to remove pieces. Despite such institutional rejection, her work resonates strongly with Indian women, who see themselves and their experiences reflected in her art. Chari says that women often come up to her at shows and whisper in her ear, "I feel the same thing. This happens to me, also." Her work has been garnering international attention in recent years. Her installation "I WAS NOT CREATED FOR PLEASURE," was featured at the 12th Berlin Biennale , in 2022, and she was an artist in residence at the 2024 India Art Fair. 'My body, my freedom II' (2021), by Mayuri Chari Image: Mayuri Chari Like Janhavi Khemka, Chari's family also influenced her path as an artist — though not always positively. Born in the coastal state of Goa in 1991, Chari spent a lot of time as a child watching and helping her father, a carpenter, create furniture and carvings. She started making art in school, where her teachers encouraged her. But after her father died, Chari was forbidden by her family, in particular her elder uncle, from pursuing higher-level studies. She defied them and did it anyway, earning a master's in fine arts with the help of friends and scholarships. Her now husband and fellow artist, Prabhakar Kamble, provided her with important support and resources in her early days out of school. While Chari's work centers on society's positioning of women, she feels it is caste, more than gender, that has affected her reception. "Everything depends on the caste, where you come from. I came from a low caste, and big galleries always appreciate the high caste people. They notice them, and they always want people who speak well in English, and who have money," she explains. During COVID, Chari (center) launched a project called 'Me, home and the kitchen,' that sought to empower local women affected by the lockdown Image: Manasee Chari Advice for aspiring young artists Chari's current projects include a short documentary about the lives of rural female sugar laborers and textile projects dealing with trousseau-making — a bridal needlework practice that Portuguese colonizers brought to her home state of Goa and that continues to be passed on today from mother to daughter; she learned it from her own mother. Janhavi Khemka's mother will also continue to be at the forefront of her work. In the future, she hopes to make a movie using woodcut print animation exploring their relationship. Drawing on her own experience, she tells younger artists to "face failure with courage, hold on to patience and hope, and be ready to meet challenges head-on." Chari, for her part, advises younger artists to make sure they remain free and independent thinkers. "They shouldn't follow others," she says. "Or follow the thoughts, ideas, what other artists are doing, but don't copy them." Edited by: Brenda Haas
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Dedication of Richard Hunt's sculpture scheduled at Sandburg, Galesburg
A public art dedication will take place at 2 p.m. Thursday, April 24, in the Student Center on Sandburg's Galesburg campus for the donation of a piece by late renowned sculptor Richard Hunt, according to a news release. Hunt's creation, 'Winged Hybrid,' will be donated to the college by Naomi Law and Anthony Law III for the enrichment of the Sandburg community and student engagement. All are invited to attend the dedication. A native of the South Side of Chicago, Hunt, who passed away in 2023, grew to become one of the most prominent sculptors of the 20th Century. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he developed his artistic practice and devoted himself to working with metal, teaching himself to solder and later weld discarded metal he scavenged from local scrapyards. At the core of Hunt's artistic and philosophical approach was a fundamental concern with freedom: political and artistic freedom as well as personal and universal freedom. 'I am interested more than anything else in being a free person,' Hunt once said. 'To me, that means that I can make what I want to make, regardless of what anyone else thinks I should make.' Throughout his seven-decade career, Hunt staged over 170 solo exhibitions at major museums and galleries and secured more than 160 large-scale public sculpture commissions. Among his works, Hunt paid tribute to American icons such as Martin Luther King Jr., Mary McLeod Bethune, Jesse Owens, Hobart Taylor Jr. and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. In 2022, former President Barack Obama commissioned Hunt to create a sculptural work, 'Book Bird,' for the Obama Presidential Center. Learn more about Hunt here. Though not required, you can RSVP for the event here or email foundation@ Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
New York Times
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Rashid Johnson Finds His Promised Land at the Guggenheim
Averse to urban density, Frank Lloyd Wright preferred to make architecture for open, verdant sites. Accordingly, when, in 1943, he was approached by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to create a home for a new museum in New York City, Wright campaigned to locate it far from downtown, in fact outside of Manhattan, on a rise overlooking the Hudson River in the leafy Spuyten Duyvil section of the Bronx. Guggenheim said 'no way' and bought a plot on Fifth Avenue, for which Wright created the spiraling upside-down ziggurat that we have today. But he made a provision to bring the outdoors indoors. He crowned the building's rotunda with an enormous circular window to admit natural light into a space that he envisioned as nurturing both vegetation and art. The museum's new exhibition, 'Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers,' incorporates a similar image of growth: an installation, set at the very top of the museum, composed of banks of open storage shelves filled with living plants, sculptures, cultural artifacts and stacks of books. With the oculus just above, like a grow-light in a terrarium, the sight is a quietly joyous one, though the upward path to it brings many changes of mood. Born in 1977, Johnson was raised in and around Chicago in a middle-class Black home. His mother, Cheryl Johnson-Odim, is a scholar of African and African American history; his father, Jimmy Johnson, is an artist who earned a living running an electronics business. (The pair divorced when Rashid was two, and married other people.) In his teens Rashid Johnson was immersed in the new Black pop culture that had entered the American mainstream — hip-hop, soul, Spike Lee films, the Cosby Show — and still provides a deep well of reference for his work. He knew he wanted to study art and did. He earned a graduate degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and started out primarily as a photographer. The earliest works in the show, from 1998, are two shadowed and heroic-looking close-up portraits of Chicago homeless men made using a 19th century photographic method called Van Dyke Brown printing, which yields a richly loamy color. A few years later, Johnson is still making dark-toned portraits, but now they're named for historical figures and he's using himself as a sitter, as in 'Self-Portrait With My Hair Parted Like Frederick Douglass,' from 2003. A slip-slide between serious and comical is a continuing dynamic in Johnson's work, one that has given some viewers looking for a readily locatable politics in his art the impression that's it's unserious, not to say lightweight. But keeping his work off balance, creating an art that offers multiple-choice responses, is pretty clearly what he's after. And it's what identified him as part of a 'post-Black' generation of artists, so named by the curator Thelma Golden in her career-launching 2001 exhibition 'Freestyle' at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which introduced a group of young artists interested in playing with Black identity, making it personal, but also abstract and critical. Johnson was in that show. He was 24. High-profile solos and art world honors eventually followed. (He's now represented in New York and internationally by the talent-hoovering Hauser & Wirth gallery and in Los Angeles by David Kordansky; in 2016 the Guggenheim appointed him to its board of trustees, a position he relinquished in 2023.) He's never left photography entirely behind, but he's expanded his reach into many forms and media, including video, painting, mosaic, sculpture and performance, combining and overlapping them in sometimes kooky, off-the-cuff seeming ways that, again, have led to views of his art as unfocused , though this, in fact, accounts for its richness. With painting, he doesn't stay still. He does tradition oil-on-canvas work, like the scrawly, mask-like images called 'Soul Paintings.' But he also spray-paints words — 'Run,' 'Promised Land,' 'Stay Black and Die' — graffiti-style on mirrors. In 2008, he made a series of abstract paintings from a mixture of African black soap and melted wax. In 2019 he started applying almost all of these painterly media to fields of broken ceramic titles. Possibly inspired by the art of Jack Whitten (1939-2018), currently the subject of a magnificent MoMA retrospective, the tile paintings are essentially mosaics, incorporating mirror-shards, shells, wax and cast bronze forms. With their high-relief texture they walk a thin line between painting and sculpture. And the show's sculpture is some of Johnson's strongest works. A few examples —- one, 'Post Prison Writings,' a tribute to the anticolonial thinker Frantz Fanon and the activist Eldridge Cleaver — are free-standing. But the ones I'm particularly thinking of are large wall-dependent assemblage pieces suggesting a cross between home entertainment units and altars, a melding of the domestic and spiritual. One, called 'Triple Consciousness' — the title a riff on W.E.B. DuBois's definition of Black self-awareness — features three copies of the singer Al Green's sexy portrait from the cover of his 1975 'Greatest Hits' LP. They're set, side by side, high on a shelf, enshrined, like deific presences, between candlesticks. And on shelves below are small bowls filled with offerings of African shea butter, a cleansing and healing substance, of which Johnson makes frequent symbolic use. Another sculpture, called 'Fatherhood as Described by Paul Beatty,' is different in tone. A bulky construction of dark wood floorboards scarred with branding iron burns, it's named for a writer of scabrous satires on American racism and has at its center a 1950 Elliott Erwitt photograph of a smiling Black child holding a pistol to his head. The ensemble feels tight with violence. Although these and other sculptural assemblages were all produced in a short span, between 2009 and 2011, they're spaced widely apart on the ramps rather than grouped together. Similarly, many of the mosaic pieces, while sharing a date, are placed early and late in the show. This is a smart idea. Seen in bulk in a gallery, the mosaics, like various series of abstract paintings, can look like assembly-line products. Here they do not. And in general while this midcareer survey is loosely chronological in shape, its curators — Naomi Beckwith, deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim, and Andrea Karnes, interim director and chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, with Faith Hunter, a Guggenheim curatorial assistant — have departed from a strict timeline to give a sense of the polymathic flux and even disorder of Johnson's career. At the top of the spiral, directly under the oculus, tensions and confusions encountered along the path seem to lighten up, as if altitude was clearing the atmosphere. Most of the paintings here on the highest ramp are recent, abstract, straightforward oil-on-canvas, and have simple names: 'Soul Painting,' 'Surrender Painting,' 'Quiet Painting,' 'God Painting.' In a short 2024 video titled 'Sanguine' we see three male figures — Johnson, his father, Jimmy, and his young son, Julius — relaxed and reading in a homey living room. Then we see them in the same room, each holding an African mask to his face. And finally, we see them walking together on a beach at sunrise or sunset. The videos, whose title can refer to either a color (blood-red), or a mood (chill) — seem to be a portrait of a family at peace with itself and with its heritage. In one lovely scene we see Jimmy Johnson in a garden gathering a bouquet of gorgeous flowers and holding it out toward us like a gift. And a real garden, or greenhouse, composed of shelves upon shelves of potted plants and books of Black social criticism and poetry — a poem by Amiri Baraka gave the show its title — is the show's living centerpiece, one that would surely have pleased Wright, and that will repay the daily attentions of museum staff by flourishing through the run of the show. That run will be an unusually long one. The Guggenheim is in a post-Covid rough patch. Money is short. Staff has been cut. Visitor traffic is down. And, like many other museums, the Guggenheim is, at present, trading its standard exhibition schedule of mounting major shows every three or four months for a more cost-and-energy efficient one. 'Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers' will be on view for nine months, into 2026. To help keep the show feeling active and fluid over that span, the museum is organizing programs of performances. Musicians — seasoned professionals, talented hopefuls, students — will be invited to play in the top-ramp greenhouse. (A piano is already in place.) And a stage has been set up in the museum's lobby for spoken-word events such as poetry readings. Will such activities pull in new audiences? Entice people who have seen the show to return? It's a gamble, as so much is these days, culturally speaking. But how much more enlivening it is that the Guggenheim, right now, is taking the risk of using its space and time to be an open seedbed of new art, rather than a walled garden of yesterday's art history heroes. Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers April 18-Jan. 18, 2026, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, (212) 423-3500; The show will travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2026.
